How to get Hearthstone’s secret Gift of Elune card back in just 237 easy steps

With the new card back, Gift of Elune, it seems the Hearthstone dev team thought World of Warcraft wasn’t keeping the Secrets Finding Discord community busy enough. Through careful searching, massive amounts of attempts to figure out what the secrets could mean, meaningful discussion with other members — and a data leak that helped to reach a final answer — the secret was solved. It’s amazing anyone even knew about this before data leaking, because there’s a lot of play required outside usual Hearthstone — but that’s what secret finding is all about.

Some of the more minute details won’t be listed here. In our defense, the first part has a maze with 231 steps. If you need each of those bits spelled out, here’s a step-by-step guide.

To complete all of this will require some time — it took me a little over an hour and a half. It requires a card that’s only in Wild Mode, one of which is from a pack in the current expansion and costs 400 dust to create. It also requires a lot of repetitive motion, not to mention lots of looking back and forth between the game and the steps. Also, it requires some math — just addition of triple digit numbers, but that could be off-putting to some.

Stormwind Mystery 1 – The Portal Puzzle Maze

The point of this appears to be to show where the Practice Adventures and Solo Modes are now. To start this off, go to the Modes button on the selection screen, select Solo Adventure, and then select Practice. Select Druid as your class, and then choose My Collection at the bottom. If the deck isn’t already in Wild Mode, select Convert to Wild by clicking on the picture of the Druid at the top.

From there, you will need to remove two to four cards, and add two cards — you can decide if you want to add one or two copies of each, this will depend on how many copies of them you have — Oracle of Elune and Moonfire. Oracle of Elune is from the United in Stormwind expansion and is Epic, and Moonfire is only available in Wild Mode. If you don’t have them, you can always craft them.

With these in your Druid deck, start the Practice game with the Innkeeper. Make sure your class is Druid, you can choose any class for the Innkeeper. As soon as you can, play the Oracle, and hit her with the Moonfire. That will begin the Maze.

Running the Maze

This is a confusing 231 step process.

Yes, really. That’s not a typo.

On each turn, you have a minion that can attack, and one, two, or zero portals it can “attack,” or step through. You have a Hero Power that allows you to turn around. If a Portal reaches 0 hit points, the maze is over, and if you are hundreds of turns in, you know you don’t want to lose. Unless you are extremely good at figuring these out — or enjoy a challenge for its own sake — I highly recommend following a walkthrough of all the steps, because again, there are 231 of them.

On the last turn, there is just one possibility — that’s how you know you’re going to the exit at long last. Then the practice match with the Innkeeper ends like you won the match. You’ll see an achievement pop up in the lower left corner called ???.

You’re done with Mystery 1. Take a break — the next part requires more thinking.

Stormwind Mystery 2 – The Tribes

Remove Moonfire from your Druid deck and change it back to Standard — not required, but generally the game is played in this mode. Make sure to have Ysera the Dreamer and Lunar Eclipse in your deck. Ysera comes in the new standard set, so everyone will have her. Lunar Eclipse is from the Madness at the Darkmoon Faire expansion, and may require crafting.

Like the previous step, challenge the Innkeeper in Practice mode, play Ysera, and hit her with the Lunar Eclipse. That will change the board, and then the confusing part begins. After this first round, it becomes easier.

In your hand, you have ten cards referred to as Tribes. They just have a picture on them, and then ???? as information. Their placement in your hand is extremely important, as their order has a numerical representation on the board for this step. They are as follows, from left to right:

1. Demons
2. Mechs
3. Elementals
4. Beasts
5. Pirates
6. Dragons
7. Quilboars
8. Totems
9. All
10. Murlocs — but note that for the sake of the calculations to come, this tenth slot uses a value of 0.

On the board in front of you, there are three cards in play — a minion on the left, a minion to the right, and a spot in the middle that is a ? card. Every card you play will be on that middle ? spot. When you play multiple cards, you just stack them one atop the other in that middle slot.

Your opponent has seven minions. In this round and the next rounds, your two minions — not counting the ? card — will exactly match two of those minions. This is important when figuring out which minions to use for the math we’re about to get into. The first minion we start with is the left minion and the last minion we use is the right minion. We also use all the minions in between in our calculations.

Yes, calculations. We warned you there would be math.

How to figure out Stormwind Mystery 2 Stage 1

For the first round, the values and order of play is completely random, and there’s no cheat to get past it. You have to figure it out on your own. Following is an example, I’ll walk you through exactly how I did it.

My left minion is Toxfin, which is doubled on the opponent’s board. Just to be safe, look at the Toxfin my opponent has to make sure it has the same stats — I noticed in other rounds there were more than one of the same minion with different stats, and we need to use the ones with the same stats. So, the first minion to use for calculations is the opponent’s Toxfin, or the second minion in from the left. To figure out the last minion, look at my right minion — Luckydo Buccaneer. That’s my opponent’s sixth minion. For the following calculations, we do not use the two minions on the outside of the opponent’s lineup, only the five on the inside.

Now, the first minion I play is based on the number the mana cost, which you won’t see unless you hover over each card. Looking at only the five minions in the set, I add up the numbers at the top for the mana cost — not visible in the screen shot — but the numbers are 1, 3, 3, 3, and 6 for a total of 16. Only look at the last digit of that number, which is 6 in this case. Now, we refer back to the chart up above — the 6 is Dragon.

The next three cards to play are based on the Health of the opponent’s minions, again only in the set, in this case, those five minions. These you can see in the screen shot, their healths are 526, 655, 129, 380, and 419. Adding these up — which I had to do on scratch paper — I have a total of 2,109. Looking only at the last three digits, starting with the last digit, 9 is All, 0 is Murlocs, and 1 is Demons.

Finally, do the same thing with Attack. Per the screen shot — 356, 759, 103, 73, and 546. This is a total of 1,837. Again, only look at the last three digits, beginning with the last one — 7 Quilboars, 3 Elementals, and 8 Totems.

I played those seven cards on the ? in the middle of the board in that exact order — Dragon, All, Murlocs, Demons, Quilboars, Elementals, and Totems.

The middle will look like a Dragon after you place the first one, the health and attack goes up as you play cards. After playing the 7th card correctly, the board changes to a new set of cards. If at any time I mess up, I can use the Hero Power to reset and try again.

Solving Stormwind Mystery Tribes Stage 2

Bad news, good news time. Bad news — there are six more boards of this. Good news — that was the only one that was completely random.

The next board has randomness and plays out the same way, but the community figured out a calculator to avoid the elementary math of it all. Go back to the Secret Finding guide, scroll down to How to Solve Stage #2, and if you type in the Attack, Health, Type, and your card placement, if will tell you exactly what cards to play, and in what order. No more manual math on your part — though of course you can continue to figure it out on your own if you’d like.

Remember how I mentioned earlier to make sure you match stats? My card in the right slot on this board, the Nightmare Amalgam, looks like it matches two different minions on the opponent’s side. However, looking at the stats, I know I need to use the one in the fifth spot, not the third slot, which is important for the calculation.

Stormwind Mystery Tribes Community Sequences

The next five are even easier — or harder, depending how you do this. This is where the data leaks were found. It’s always the same puzzle, and no randomness, so you can just follow a walkthrough. However, the strategy for figuring out card placement didn’t seem to be the same as above. I’m not sure what you need to do to figure it out on your own, so if you’re trying to do that, best of luck. If not, you can just follow these steps.

Play the seven cards in the order listed for each sequence.

For Sequence 1:

• 2 Mechs
• 9 All
• 1 Demons
• 3 Elementals
• 9 All
• 9 All
• 7 Quilboars

For Sequence 2:

• 7 Quilboars
• 6 Dragons
• 0 Murlocs
• 5 Pirates
• 2 Mechs
• 1 Demons
• 8 Totems

For Sequence 3:

• 2 Mechs
• 3 Elementals
• 7 Quilboars
• 2 Mechs
• 3 Elementals
• 5 Pirates
• 8 Totems

For Sequence 4:

• 6 Dragons
• 1 Demons
• 9 All
• 0 Murlocs
• 8 Totems
• 4 Beasts
• 9 All

For Sequence 5:

• 8 Totems
• 7 Quilboars
• 4 Beasts
• 7 Quilboars
• 7 Quilboars
• 8 Totems
• 7 Quilboars

Collect your rewards from the ??? achievement, including the Gift of Elune card back

With that, you’re done. The match ends, you complete the Practice Mode game with the Innkeeper, and you earn another ??? Achievement. Go to your Achievements, and find the ???, also called Burn My Sight. You must click on this and open it to earn your well-deserved rewards, including Experience, Achievement Points, and the Gift of Elune card back. You will not have the card back in your collection until you click on the achievement.

Then go stretch your legs, drink some water, and wriggle your fingers. That was a very long session of Hearthstone.

Originally published 9/15/2021